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This week, I have been mostly reading…

Some useful articles that I’ve seen around the interweb over the past seven days or so.

I’m going to come back to the first two in a longer post shortly, but you should read these pieces fully. They highlight further problems (or should that be ‘challenges’) with some of the web models out there which forward-thinking digital marketers (that’s you isn’t it?) need to be addressing:

Drewbot: ‘Content’ creep The mantra that ‘content is king’ is not correct, because ‘content’ can mean anything of any quality. If you’re driving to increase your content simply in order to get more eyeballs to sell more adverts then you’re soon going to face a ‘content crunch’ – the quality of your content will go down, the quality of your advertising will go down, you will end up chasing cheaper adverts and putting more of them on the page. And still you won’t be able to compete with content farms. Two quotes:

If you find yourself in a “content crunch” increasing the value of your advertising is not a realistic option, as your “content” is low quality. Your only option is to increase the number of advertisements. So publishers caught in the crunch surround their underperforming “content” with an antagonizing amount of bottom-of-the-barrel advertising.

“Content” and the metrics it enables are not unlike a drug. They offer a quick fix for publishers, but overuse leads to a brutal hangover.

Avinash Kaushik: the 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book Unless your marketing mindset changes you will not succeed; your business, your site, your people cannot be good at just one thing, and the same applies to your marketing campaigns and your interactions with your customers.

At one time, it was okay to be 100% good at one thing, and only one thing. But today companies with people who are 70% magnificent at one thing and have filled the remaining 30% with being good at everything in the periphery of their jobs will rule this world.

And you have to be backing this up with budget – it’s the old direct marketing philosphy of test, test, test, try something completely different, test, test, test.

And talking of things that should be bleedin obvious, EConsultancy: Measuring email. What are the key metrics you use in deciding which email campaigns or tests have worked best? It needs to be ROI and lifetime value, “the challenge is no longer to increase your open rates, it is to grow lifetime value”.

A couple of useful posts on SEO:

EConsultancy: Top five KPIs for SEO campaigns. A plea for “quality not quantity”. what use is being number one for a search term that doesn’t have much search volume? What use is traffic to you if it doesn’t convert? What’s your ROI?

The Wall Blog: What does Google’s page layout algorithm mean for you? Just when you think you’ve got this SEO thing cracked, along comes Google and changes the rules. Again. And read the first sentence: Google are planning 500 changes to their search algorithm this year; the more effort you put into trying to game the system rather than building a site that people actually want to use, the more likely you are to wake up one morning and find your natural search traffic has melted away.

Has anything caught your eye this week? Tweet me a link or post one in the comments box.